The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is about to decide the fate of 95 properties that have been languishing, some of them for decades, on its calendar.

Late in 2014 the commission’s chairwoman, Meenakshi Srinivasan, appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, announced that the slate would simply be cleared. City Hall let it be known that earlier administrations had created the backlog. It was time for a fresh start.

This thrilled the Real Estate Board of New York, which the mayor was courting. Preservationists went ballistic. Behind the scenes, I heard that some staff members at the commission were also upset. They had worked long hours over many years to research which properties deserved to make the calendar in the first place.

Of course, the bigger issue was that erasing the backlog meant dozens of potential landmarks could suddenly be demolished. In calendar limbo, at least they were temporarily preserved. New York is a dynamic metropolis, propelled by change, but it isn’t a giant Etch A Sketch.

So credit the commission, a typically opaque body with a history of mission creep, for backing off from the plan, instead promising hearings and an expedited review. As best as I can tell, this process has been unfolding. It culminates on Tuesday, when commissioners are to vote at a public meeting on which properties will be bumped from consideration or pushed for designation.

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The I.R.T. Powerhouse, where Con Edison operates a steam plant, on Manhattan’s West Side.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

The properties are scattered across all five boroughs, from the I.R.T. Powerhouse on the West Side of Manhattan to parish churches in the Bronx and Brooklyn to the Pepsi-Cola sign overlooking the East River in Queens.

How properties became stuck on the commission’s calendar is a story of backroom politics and bureaucracy for another time. Suffice it to say, pressure was sometimes applied on overburdened commissioners to delay decisions. The commission is underfunded and understaffed. A proposal now before the City Council limits the time that a proposed landmark can stay on the calendar. The irreversibility of demolition needs to be weighed against the rights of property owners, a tricky balance to achieve.

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Exterior of the Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

But even trickier is that slippery question of what constitutes a landmark. The Bergdorf Goodman store at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street is one of the backlogged properties. Beloved, a tourist attraction and crucial linchpin in the fabric of that neighborhood, it’s not glorious architecture, truth be told, with the addition of a 1980s facade that indirectly puts postmodernism on the agenda. Preservationists have rightly been lobbying hard to save it.

The building, originating in 1928, sits on a plot of land that Bergdorf’s owners could probably sell to some developer of luxury apartment towers for a king’s ransom. It used to be the site of the 1883 Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion, designed by George B. Post and Richard Morris Hunt. Had New York City’s landmarks law been passed not a half-century ago but just a few decades earlier, the mansion would almost certainly have been preserved and there would be no Bergdorf Goodman building today to save.

Back then, “the loss of familiar older buildings often brought with it the trade-off of much better new ones,” Paul Goldberger observed in his 2009 book “Why Architecture Matters.” He pointed out that the Empire State Building replaced the old Waldorf Astoria by Henry Hardenbergh and the Frick mansion, by Carrère and Hastings, replaced Hunt’s Lenox Library.

But by midcentury a proliferation of bad Modern architecture had caused popular sentiment to sour. The preservation movement was born from a desire to save endangered architectural treasures from the fate of a lost Pennsylvania Station but also from a growing resistance to an accelerating trend of ever greater density and height.

Such concerns have gradually led the commission to designate whole neighborhoods, to tie up properties where bigger buildings might sprout and to grant landmark status to places that were not architecturally distinguished but culturally and socially meaningful and deserving of commemoration, like the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street.

Designating Stonewall a landmark last year was a no-brainer and a declaration of civic pride. But it also showed how, absent additional regulations, the city’s landmark law had become a catchall. As a safeguard of architecture of aesthetic significance, it clearly wasn’t intended to enshrine what looks like the current Home Depot picture window or brick veneer on the inn’s facade. The law doesn’t prevent the nail salon next to Stonewall from expanding into the inn. It doesn’t dictate use.

So, this is why, if the commission designates the Pepsi-Cola sign, it will in effect be protecting the medium, but not the message. Yes, I know, what is the sign, if not the neon lettering that spells out the brand name? But technically the Pepsi name is content, which the law doesn’t enforce.

Fortunately this apparent Alice in Wonderland conundrum poses no imminent threat, since Pepsi entered a while back into a binding agreement not to change the sign. A landmark designation in effect would reinforce the agreement and underscore the city’s fondness for a pop-culture artifact.

In the same vein, a summer bungalow community on Staten Island that was once home to Dorothy Day, the bohemian founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was razed in 2001 under questionable circumstances by the developer who had acquired it. He hoped to erect mansions on the site. They were never built, and today the place is a patch of milkweed and thistle, but the commission is still considering designating the property to honor Day, a poetic gesture.

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St. Barbara’s Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn.CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

Which raises a related question: Who really owns a proposed landmark? Back in 1965, Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic for The New York Times, described the Edgar J. Kaufmann Conference Center at 809 United Nations Plaza, designed by Alvar and Elissa Aalto, as “the most beautiful and distinguished interior New York has seen in many years.” The building’s current owner opposes the interior’s designation. Similarly, the religious authorities overseeing some of the churches on the list, like the beautiful St. Barbara’s in Brooklyn, Immaculate Conception in the Bronx and First Reformed Church in Queens, are pressed for cash and have lobbied against landmark status.

But in all of these cases, doesn’t the public also have a claim on these properties? Alvar Aalto left behind precious few works in the United States. Church buildings are more than private property. They are historically integral to neighborhoods, anchoring communities, often even after they’ve been repurposed.

The powerhouse is a working Con Ed facility, and the company says it needs to be able to change and adapt as technology evolves. But the building is a Beaux-Arts glory by McKim, Mead & White with a soaring interior. It embodies New York’s boundless ambition just over a century ago. Some compromise seems in order.

Hey, here’s a thought: Keep it on the calendar.

Correction:Feb. 17, 2016

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that Meenakshi Srinivasan announced that the slate of properties on the commission’s calendar would simply be cleared. It was late in 2014, not late last year.